Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542912
He was fascinated by lawyers pitching themselves in crazier and crazier ways when, bottom line, "they're asking you to involve them in very serious life situations," he says. He loved the dichotomy, but still, he wasn't compelled to learn everything he could about being a lawyer. "We're satirizing how the law works," he says. Instead, he thought about how the live-action series 30 Rock approached putting on a sketch comedy show—he wanted to do the same thing, but with legal cases as the tool to tell wacky stories. "The law show is a vessel that's pretty well-known in the live-action world," says Supervising Director Adam Parton. As such, Strip Law draws viewers in with the familiar, and "once [you] create a package that everyone recognizes, then you can burst out of that in the weirdest, wildest ways." "[With animation], you're able to transcend reality in a way that live action has a very hard time doing," says Executive Producer Antonio Canobbio, who oversaw the creative direction of the show, while Art Director Tyler Rice adds: "I think [animation] audiences are a bit more forgiving. Some of the things we might try to do in live action, people just wouldn't buy it… whereas animation gives us so much more freedom." The goal is that viewers will go along for the ride, and Parton says the Strip Law ride was an especially wild one because Crawford drew no boundaries. If the team wanted to push on something, Crawford would say, "Go further!" Along with the storylines, pushing included the style, which incorporated everything from stop-motion to live action. "I remember being 10 years old when The Simpsons did an episode, and it ended in the real world of action footage," says Crawford. "That just lit up my brain." this page: A simple set serves to emphasize wacky courtroom antics; No tactic is off limits, not even an army of crows; Strip Law's unconventional legal team. opposite page: Canobbio says the creative team looked at night and day Las Vegas as two different characters, as seen in these versions of the building that houses Lincoln Gumb's law practice. "[With animation] you're able to transcend reality in a way that live action has a very hard time doing." -Antonio Canobbio F E AT U R E 28 KEYFRAME